BioLogos: Approaching Adam

BioLogos has a post on how to approach the teaching of the historical Adam aimed specifically at parents as they talk to their kids. Christy Hemphill writes:

If your kids are hearing a young earth creationist perspective at church or a Christian school, they may find those ideas very appealing and convincing for a time. Depending on your situation and personality, you may have to be careful not to put your kids in the middle of your own power struggles or debates with other adults in your lives. Kids need space and time to build their worldviews and figure stuff out for themselves. If you consistently model openness to questions and how to seek out reliable information to answer them, that will pay off. But at the end of the day, it will be your honesty and unconditional acceptance that will make you trustworthy to your kids, not the strength of your answers and arguments.

The other issue she discusses is something that rears its ugly head in my household regularly:

Most parents in the American context have to decide how to handle Santa Claus in their family. If you are one of the families that introduces the idea of Santa Claus to your children as make believe from the beginning, you probably still don’t want your kids to make themselves a persona non grata by ensuring every other kid in preschool is clued in. The analogy breaks down, of course, especially if you believe that Adam and Eve are historical figures, but most parents don’t want their kids to alienate others or be ostracized in some way for having different insights into Genesis than their peer group. What do you do when all your kids’ cousins, or friends from Sunday School, or classmates at the homeschool co-op are being taught something very different about Adam and Eve and the origins of humans?

I have been open with my kids about the fact that I am an evolutionary creationist and accept not just an old universe but evolution as it pertains to all life, including humans. We have not had a really good conversation about Adam and Eve because my thoughts are not concrete on this issue. While it is possible they were real people, it is clear from the account in Genesis that the entire episode is stylized, geographically truncated (what was happening on the rest of the planet at that time?) and reads like myth.  John Walton argues that the story is presenting theological truths at the expense of literal facts and that it mirrors other accounts of creation at that time period.

Dennis Venema presents some strong genetic evidence that the human population could never have been below the effective size of 10,000 and was likely much larger.  The other issue is the source for the original Mitochondrial Eve and Male Y chromosome.  As he puts it:

Current estimates place mitochondrial Eve just after the dawn of Homo sapiens as recorded in the fossil record, at about 180 KYA. This places her within our species. Until recently, Y-chromosome Adam was dated later, at about 50 KYA, the time of significant human migration out of Africa. Recently, however, a rare Y-chromosome variant has been found in modern humans that pushes back the last common ancestor of all human Y-chromosome DNA to approximately 210 KYA – which, interestingly enough, is right at the cusp of our own species as recorded in the fossil record. Since our species arose as a continuous population that gradually diverged from other hominins, there is no reason to expect that all of our DNA variation will come back to a common ancestor (or coalesce, to use the technical term) within our species. Indeed, some of our regular chromosomal variation does not coalesce within our species or even as far back as our common ancestral population with chimpanzees.

The problems for the literal Adam begin to mount very quickly and it becomes hard to make sure that you don't kill a child's faith with these nagging bits of evidence.

This is a thorny topic because it cuts to the beginning of the Bible and how we understand the notion of original sin.  As far as the historical Adam and Eve being the first people, the science since is unclear.

Lutheran Church Tackles Creation Days

Christian Post has an article on the recent Lutheran Synod resolution involving the “creation days.” Michael Gryboski writes:

The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod passed a resolution at their convention affirming the belief that God created the Earth “in six natural days.”

At the 67th Regular Convention of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod on Tuesday, the theologically conservative denomination adopted Resolution 5-09A, titled “To Confess the Biblical Six-Day Creation.”

“We confess that the duration of those natural days is proclaimed in God’s Word: ‘there was evening and there was morning, the first day,’” resolved the resolution.

The resolution also declared that the creation of Adam as the first human being was a “historical event” and rejected the claims of the theory of evolution.

As noted in the article, there is some debate about what the word “natural” means in this context.

Another delegate expressed concern over the alleged “lack of clarity” on the definition of the word “natural” as used in the resolution.

Supporters responded that the term “natural” was defined by the Bible’s own words, describing the days as having an evening and a morning.

This has always struck me as a peculiar defense given how the scriptures actually reads:

14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day. (Genesis 1:14-19, NIV)

Every translation reads pretty much the same way.  That happens on the fourth day. Without the sun and moon, you cannot have “evening and morning.”  There is no reasonable context for it.  To argue this implies that the entire universe revolves around a 24-hour earth day.  We know this is not so.

It is notable that the vote was 662 in favor and 309 against, so there is quite a bit of dissent about the resolution.  The rider involving evolution, while not taking center stage, is a slap in the face to those congregants who accept it.  The rising science of coalescence theory is hard to square with the idea of Adam and Eve being the first humans.   As Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight put it in their book Adam and the Genome,

As our methodology becomes more sophisticated and more data are examined, we will likely further refine our estimates in the future. That said, we can be confident that finding evidence that we were created independently of other animals or that we descend from only two people just isn’t going to happen. Some ideas in science are so well supported that it is highly unlikely new evidence will substantially modify them, and these are among them: The sun is at the center of our solar system, humans evolved, and we evolved as a population.

I always find it somewhat interesting that these large denominations fight tooth-and-nail over social issues that are somewhat fluid in society, such as homosexuality and female ordination, and yet, for issues in which there is actually hard, scientific evidence, retreat to a very flat, conservative interpretation of scripture.

Interestingly, the new T-shirt being issued by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America celebrates both science and LGBT rights.  That is not true for the science part.

Young Earth Creationism: Now Transitional Fossils Are Okay

Recently, Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight produced an excellent book titled Adam and the Genome: Reading Genesis After Genetic Science.  I have just finished this book and it is very well-written and concise.  It is also very persuasive in its presentation of the veracity of evolutionary theory, that there were never just two people alive at one time and that the modern human line extends back more than 200 thousand years.  To bolster their argument, however, Venema and McKnight take the reader through an account of many of the transitional forms in the fossil record.

Well, Answers in Genesis has taken a potshot at the book, in several articles by Nathaniel Jeanson, who has argued that Venema's central thesis, that evolution is strongly supported by explanatory evidence and has predictive power, is flawed.  Here is where things get peculiar. Jeanson writes this, regarding the existence of transitional fossils:

In other words, Genesis 1 says that God created man in His own image. In light of this fact, we would be justified in looking to the products of human design to understand the principles that God might have employed in designing life. Since humans design “transitional forms,” why wouldn’t God do so as well?

Thus, while the existence of “transitional forms” might fail to reject the hypothesis of evolution, it also fails to reject the hypothesis of design. As we observed in a previous post, this is a type-3 experiment—in other words, pseudoscience.

This fact applies to Venema’s additional claim about fossil gaps being filled in. Since both YEC scientists and evolutionists predict the existence of “transitional forms,” it doesn’t matter how many fossil gaps are filled; none of these filled gaps will distinguish between creation and evolution. (Of course, if gaps never were filled in, evolutionists would have a lot of explaining to do, as Darwin’s own writings reveal. In formal terms of a previous article, the gaps in the fossil record represent a type-2 experiment—the existence of gaps would spell trouble for evolution; the lack of gaps would say nothing about either model.) (emphasis added)

Wut?

For almost a hundred years, one of the steady mantras of the supporters of recent-earth or young-earth creationism has been that there are no such things as transitional fossils.  Animals were created as “kinds” that were, to a large extent, immutable.  Duane Gish, one of the grand old men of YEC used to attempt to poke holes in the idea of transitional fossils with his “Bossie to Blowhole” slide attempting to show the absurdity of the idea that modern-day whales are the descendants of land animals.  I once attended a lecture by Gish in which he used this slide.

To be sure, many argued that microevolution could take place—the subtle changing of gene frequencies and mutations—but species change simply did not happen. Donald Prothero, in his book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, devastatingly showed this to be false.

(Plug: If you have not read this book, you need to.  It is a fantastic trip through the fossil record and the support for evolutionary theory.

The entire study of baraminology is predicated on the fact that there are no transitional fossils, simply created kinds.  Here is AiG's page on the subject, with multiple articles, yet Jeanson's article shows up on the Answers in Genesis web site.  Let's have a look and see what else they have to say about transitional fossils:

Regarding the dinosaur to bird transition: Fossils Fail to Transition from Dinosaur Legs to Bird Wings

The biblical record of history is not only consistent with what we observe in the world but even explains much of what science shows us. The fact that birds appear complete and without evolutionary transitions in the fossil record is, like the rest of actual scientific observations, consistent with God’s Word, which we can confidently trust from the very first verse. 

The Devonian tetrapod transition: The Fossil Record of ‘Early’ Tetrapods: Evidence of a Major Evolutionary Transition?

A robust rationale for concluding that the Upper Devonian tetrapods evolved from a fish ancestor, or that they gave rise to Carboniferous tetrapod lineages, is lacking. It is hoped that this paper may stimulate creationists to develop a fuller understanding of these remarkable creatures and their ecological and geological context.

On the ancestry of whales: It's a 'Whale'

The “evolution” is entirely in the minds of evolutionists, who need to find ancestors for whales, and thus create a “sequence” that isn’t really there. Like lining up horse fossils small to large and proclaiming a sequence, whale evolution is just another fiction.

About gaps in the fossil record: Does a ‘Transitional Form’ Replace One Gap with Two Gaps?

Once the lack of major transitions is acknowledged, one must face the fact that there is no tree of life because there are no roots, no trunk, no boughs, and no medium-sized branches. There are only mutually disjointed bushes, and even these consist exclusively of variation only within the kind, and this is almost invariably within the family unit of traditional taxonomy. The scientific creationist needs to only reject organic evolution before being in hearty agreement with the foregoing cited statements.

As we can see, even the Answers in Genesis site, at least for the last twenty years has had the official position that transitional fossils do not exist.  So, now transitional fossils are okay?  Jeanson's article is an astounding thing to read.  Not only does he dispense with almost a hundred years of creationist “teaching,” without once referring to its existence, he then turns around and accuses Venema of pseudoscience because his hypothesis fails to reject creationist teaching on the existence of transitional fossils. The mendacity of Jeanson's argument is breathtaking.  This is a complete disregard for scientific integrity and honesty.  Libby Anne of Patheos refers to this as exactly what it is: Bullshit.

But Jeanson isn't done.  He then writes something truly idiotic regarding the order of the fossil record:

What about the order of the fossils in the fossil record? The order was actually discovered before Darwin published his book. Therefore, it would be nearly impossible to call the order of the fossils a “prediction” of evolution. Instead, both sides in the origins debate look back on this discovery and incorporate it into their model. Thus, while the order of fossils might fail to reject the hypothesis of evolution, it fails to reject the hypothesis of creation.

This betrays a complete lack of understanding of how the theory of natural selection came about. Darwin's theory predicted that if natural selection was the best explanation for present and past diversity in the fossil record and that there should be increasing order of complexity in the fossil record, leading up to humans and that more transitional forms WOULD be found in the fossil record in the future, a prediction that has been borne out many times over (e.g. Tiktaalik, the evolution of whales).

One more thing: the order of the fossil record has always been a stumbling block for creationists because it is difficult to explain the order in the context of a world-wide flood.  Species that should sink to the bottom, like large dinosaurs and sea creatures, are found three-quarters of the way up the column.  Additionally, there are no humans or their cultural remains found at the bottom, which is what you would expect.  Indeed, the world-wide flood hypothesis is easily rejected based on multiple lines of evidence. 

Ironically, at the tail end of the article, Jeanson writes this:

Why does Venema make these basic scientific mistakes? We observed above that the answers to Venema’s claims have been in the YEC literature for several years. Yet we also observed in a previous post that evolutionists refuse to read YEC literature. And we discovered that they do so because they apparently think that YEC scientists are liars. Naturally, this leads to ignorance of the opposition—and, effectively, to fitting of facts to preconceived ideas.

Gee, I can't imagine why we would think that.

One of the comments on Libby Anne's story, by Deus ex Lasagna, put it best (if sarcastically):

"You don't have enough faith," Jesus told them. "I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this goalpost, 'Move from here to there,' and it would move. Nothing would be impossible."

- Matthew 17:20, updated for realism

New Post by Dennis Venema on Biological Information

Dennis Venema has a new post on the testing of an hypothesis by supporters of ID:

In previous posts in this series, we’ve explored the claim made by the Intelligent Design (ID) movement that evolutionary mechanisms are not capable of generating the information-rich sequences in genes. One example that we have explored is nylonase – an enzyme that allows the bacteria that have it to digest the human-made chemical nylon, and use it as a food source. As we have seen, nylonase is a good example of a de novo gene – a gene that arose suddenly and came under natural selection because of its new and advantageous function. Since nylonase is a folded protein with a demonstrable function, it should be beyond the ability of evolution to produce, according to ID.

It goes downhill from there for ID.Experiments routinely show that new proteins that appear can, very often, have functions and be incorporated into the genome. Further, this, apparently, happens at all stages of gene replication, transcription and translation.  As Venema notes at the end:

The importance of these results for ID arguments is clear. By direct experimental test, new biological functions have been shown to be common, not rare, within random sequences - and that these functions may be found in either RNA transcripts or de novo protein products. By Gauger’s own measure, ID advocates have been shown to be wrong. Since this particular ID claim undergirds a large proportion of the ID argument that biological information cannot have arisen through evolution, the consequences for ID are significant.

Stephen Meyer and Douglas Axe have, in the words of the Discovery Institute: “made this strong claim:”

[T]he neo-Darwinian mechanism — with its reliance on a random mutational search to generate novel gene sequences — is not an adequate mechanism to produce the information necessary for even a single new protein fold, let alone a novel animal form, in available evolutionary deep time.

From these experiments, we now know this to be completely wrong.

A Conversation with Scot McKnight

Scot McKnight, a New Testament professor at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Illinois, and co-author of Adam and the Genome, with Dennis Venema, recently was interviewed and said that it was a BioLogos conference and the evidence he was told there that changed how he viewed the first three chapters of Genesis.  Baptist News Global has the scoop:

“The number one reason young people walk away from the faith is the conflict of their interpretation of Scripture with their interpretation of science,” he said. “Let it be emphasized that we are dealing here with the interpretation of Scripture, not necessarily Scripture’s truest meaning. And, yes, we are dealing with a theoretical construct called evolution.” McKnight said many people on both sides regard science and faith as “implacable enemies.”

“Some scientists think we are fools for believing in the Bible and therefore in Jesus,” he said, “while for some conservative theologians and pastors and bloggers, scientists are materialists, atheists, and those who think they are Christian and evolutionist are oblivious to the slippery slide they are halfway down.”

McKnight said the question he hears most often when discussing Gen. 1-3 is “do you believe in a historical Adam?” It’s a question “loaded with theological meaning,” he said, including belief that Adam and Eve were real people who had a “biological and procreative relationship with every human being who has ever lived” and that all people living today possess a share of their DNA.

I am about three-quarters of the way through the book and it is worth the read. He is one of a growing chorus of people (notably John Walton also) who are raising the concern that people are walking away from the faith because they get to college and encounter grounded science that conflicts with the non-grounded creationism they were taught in high school or home school.

It is clear that McKnight has read Walton, however.  Here is how he puts it:

McKnight said he doesn’t like the terms “myth,” “fable” and “legend” when applied to Genesis, so he uses “theological narrative.”

“I read the text as a theological narrative about God as creator, about humans assigned by God to a vocation in God’s cosmic temple on God’s sacred time, and I see the tragedy of humans who refuse to do what God said,” he said.

This perspective is absorbed from Walton's The Lost World of Genesis One, another book I am piecing through, which is considerably denser than Adam and the Genome but worthwhile, nonetheless. 

New Book by Dennis Venema and Scott McKnight: Adam and the Genome

Dennis Venema and Scott McKnight have released a new book called Adam and the Genome.  From the BioLogos blurb:

This week on the blog we’ll have a series of reflections on the book from people across a range of views. Tomorrow will feature Pete Enns of Eastern University (and former BioLogos Senior Fellow);  later in the week we'll hear from Ken Keathley of Southeastern Baptist Seminary and Denis Alexander of the Faraday Institute at Cambridge University. We’ve invited Venema and McKnight to respond to these posts on the blog next week. Today I’ll give an overview of the book—hopefully just enough to whet your appetite to get the book and read the whole thing.

The BioLogos statement of beliefs doesn’t mention Adam and Eve (neither do the historic creeds of the church), and different members of our community come to different conclusions on the topic. We think it is important for there to be continued conversations among informed and committed Christians on this and other important issues.

Here is the cover.

Hopefully, there will be a Kindle version soon. I am still wading through John Walton's book on Genesis 1, after having finished David Mongomery's The Rocks Don't Lie and Joel Edmund Anderson's The Heresy of Ham, both of which I highly recommend.

BioLogos, Ken Ham and David Menton—A Response, Part V

This is part five of the response to David Menton's post on the Answers in Genesis page, on human origins.  It is also a few days late.  We are now to the section that he calls “Making Apes Out of Men.”

Point 10.  He writes:

In an effort to fill the gap between apes and men, certain fossil men have been declared to be “apelike” and thus, ancestral to at least “modern” man. You might say this latter effort seeks to make a “monkey” out of man! Human fossils that are claimed to be “apemen” are generally classified under the genus Homo (meaning “man”). These include Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo neanderthalensis.

The best-known human fossils are of Cro-Magnon man (whose marvelous paintings are found on the walls of caves in France) and Neanderthal man. Both are clearly human and have long been classified as Homo sapiens. In recent years, however, Neanderthal man has been downgraded to a different species—Homo neanderthalensis. The story of how Neanderthal man was demoted to an apeman provides much insight into the methods of evolutionists.

Neanderthal man was first discovered in 1856 by workmen digging in a limestone cave in the Neander valley near Dusseldorf, Germany. The fossil bones were examined by an anatomist (Professor Schaafhausen) who concluded that they were human.
At first, not much attention was given to these finds, but with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, the search began for the imagined “apelike ancestors” of man. Darwinians argued that Neanderthal man was an apelike creature, while many critical of Darwin (like the great anatomist Rudolph Virchow) argued that Neanderthals were human in every respect, though some appeared to be suffering from rickets or arthritis. 

Here he gets things exactly backwards. Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis and Homo neanderthalensis are not classified by any palaeoanthropologists as “ape men.”  Such a statement is ridiculous on its face.  The reason that those fossil species are in the genus Homo is because they are advanced enough to be placed there.  They are classified as “hominids” or “hominins.”

He uses the phrase “Cro Magnon man” as if it pertains to all of modern humans.  He reinforces this by remarking on the cave paintings, even though those don't show up until the Upper Palaeolithic, at Chauvet Cave.  He then writes that both Neandertals and modern humans are classified as Homo sapiens, but that in recent years, Neandertals have been “downgraded.”

Really?  As Dave Frayer¹ put it:

The “Neanderthals are inferior” attitude traces back to their earliest descriptions in the mid-1800s when the first Neanderthal was labeled as “freak” or an “idiot” or “incapable of moral and religious conception.” For many, the discoveries after 1865 confirmed these labels. Even the majority of human paleontologists supported this view.

That is 160 years ago.  How is that "recently?"  Menton is also wrong that Neandertals were first discovered in the Neander Valley.  That is just where the type-specimen were found. Second, he is wrong about what those who discovered it thought it was.  From my BioLogos post on Neandertals:

Known far and wide for its limestone, the Neandertal or Neander “Valley” attracted the attention of local industrial groups in the early 1700s and considerable mining was carried out in this area through the middle 1800s. It was during the mining of one such area in 1856, Feldhofer Cave, that workers discovered a set of bones, which they initially thought belonged to a bear. To the local biology teacher, Johann Fulrott, who had been called in to identify them, they looked remarkably human—but not exactly. Something was not quite right. Intrigued by their form, and knowing that they represented something out of the ordinary, he took them to the city of Bonn and showed them to university anatomist Hermann Schaffhausen. After a joint investigation of the skeletal remains, in 1857 Fulrott and Schaffhausen announced to the world that they represented a new form of human predating modern Homo sapiens and with an as yet undetermined relationship with them.

What they did not know at the time was that the remains from the Feldhofer Cave very closely resembled those that had been removed from the Belgian site of Engis and the Forbes Quarry site in Gibraltar several decades earlier. It was not until 1864 that these remains as a group began to be referred to as “Neandertal Man.”  (King, 1864).

The La Chapelle-aux-Saints Neandertal was discovered by A. and J. Bouyssonie, and L. Bardon, in 1908.  As Menton notes, in 1911 Marcelin Boule, the French anthropologist, wrote an extensive monograph on it.  Boule was handicapped by an almost overwhelming inability to conceive of these remains as being ancestral to modern humans in any way. Consequently, the publication that emanated from his investigation was rife with errors that it is difficult, in hindsight, to justify or excuse.

The La Chapelle Neandertal was also an old man. This could be seen from the number of missing teeth and resorption of bone around those that had fallen out. Also present was considerable osteoarthritis, especially in the vertebrae. The arthritis may have made it hard to walk. Boule took this characteristic in the La Chapelle specimen and made it seems as though the Neandertal’s natural gait was slouching and primitive. Boule also focused on the sloping forehead and the huge eyes and nose, arguing that these were primitive. He contended that these features strongly suggested a placement in the evolutionary line little above the great apes, with little to no intelligence that would have linked this race to modern humans (Boule, 1911-1913)².

He notes that the “great anatomist” Virchow thought that Neandertals were modern human.  Of this, Drell³ writes:

The Neanderthal find was made only three years before Darwin published The Origins of Species and thus the discovery of the Neander Valley was seen to verify his theories.6 An ardent debate evolved, centred around Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen, who both proposed that the bones were those of an archaic human form. This was in direct opposition to one of Germany’s leading scientists of the era, Rudolf Virchow, a distinguished pathologist who rigorously rejected the hypothesis. In his view, the bones were those of a recently deceased pathological human. Virchow’s viewpoint had a great impact on the following decades of research, not least because of his prominence in Germany. His persistent dismissal of all discovered hominid fossils is thought to have impeded progress for the rest of the century (see Stringer and Gamble 1993; Trinkaus and Shipman 1993).

Point 11. In his discourse, Menton attempts to portray Neandertals as misunderstood modern humans and that they had completely modern morphology.  This simply is not so.  As Fred Smith, a palaeoanthropologist who has studied Neandertals for decades noted, while there are traits in modern Europeans that are reminiscent of Neandertals here and there, there is no single person alive who bears the entire suite of Neandertal traits.  Harvati⁴ writes this:

Neanderthals are characterized by a multitude of distinctive cranial, mandibular, dental, and postcranial anatomical features (Fig. 2), many of which are unique to them. Neanderthals also show several “primitive” features, i.e., features shared with the common ancestor of both Neanderthals and modern humans

Here is a graphic example of how modern humans and Neandertals differed.  The skull on the left is a cast of the La Chapelle Neandertal, while the skull on the right is cast of a modern human from the site of Predmosti, dated to around 27, 000 years B.P.

There are several things to note about this image.  The entire face of the Neandertal is larger than the modern human skull.  Further, the middle of the face is prognathic, or pulled out.  There is a large brow ridge present on the Neandertal that is missing on the modern human.  The Neandertal's teeth are much larger, especially the front ones.  The Neandertal forehead is also more sloped than the modern human one.  Behind the face, the skull of Neandertals is very long and low, while modern humans possess a much more rounded skull.  It was these features that gave rise to the idea that Neandertals were a separate species from modern humans.  They may yet be, although in recent years, it has been found that at some point in their evolutionary history, they interbred with modern humans to some extent.

In our own analyses⁵ of Neandertal crania, using as a comparison a modern human sample of over 2500 known modern human individuals from 23 different populations, we found that they never fell within the range of the modern sample.  In fact, every bivariate plot that I produced contained a nice grouping of Neandertals, away from modern humans.  Using this statistical morphological definition of modern human, Neandertals cannot be classified as modern. 

Point  11.  Menton writes:

In addition to anatomical evidence, there is a growing body of cultural evidence for the fully human status of Neanderthals. They buried their dead and had elaborate funeral customs that included arranging the body and covering it with flowers. They made a variety of stone tools and worked with skins and leather. A wood flute was recently discovered among Neanderthal remains. There is even evidence that suggests that Neanderthals engaged in medical care. Some Neanderthal specimens show evidence of survival to old age despite numerous wounds, broken bones, blindness, and disease. This suggests that these individuals were cared for and nurtured by others who showed human compassion.

Still, efforts continue to be made to somehow dehumanize Neanderthal man. Many evolutionists now even insist that Neanderthal man is not even directly related to modern man because of some differences in a small fragment of DNA! There is, in fact, nothing about Neanderthals that is in any way inferior to modern man. One of the world’s foremost authorities on Neanderthal man, Erik Trinkaus, concludes: “Detailed comparisons of Neandertal skeletal remains with those of modern humans have shown that there is nothing in Neandertal anatomy that conclusively indicates locomotor, manipulative, intellectual, or linguistic abilities inferior to those of modern humans.”

Here, Menton correctly hits on an area that is very controversial in modern palaeoanthropological studies: whether Neandertals were a separate species from anatomically modern Homo sapiens.  He is correct that Neandertals did practice cultural behaviors that we would associate with modern humans, even if they were not on the level of what one finds in the Upper Palaeolithic.  It is, indeed, quite possible that had Neandertals not been subject to the crushing cold and harsh environment of the Wurm glaciation, they might have achieved considerably more than they did.  We will never know.  Regarding the origins of modern humans, there are competing views. 

On one side of this debate are those who support the multiregional evolution model in which modern humans arose throughout the Old World through a complex interaction of migration, drift and selection between populations.  On the other side are those that argue that modern humans are a completely different species that migrated out of North Africa, "replacing" the archaic humans that they encountered.  It is clear that neither of these extremes is correct.  The earliest modern humans are, indeed, found in Africa and there is evidence that modern humans and archaic humans did, in fact, interbreed to some extent.

This is a debate that has raged for decades and shows no signs of slowing down.  However, while there is considerable debate between different researchers, as noted above, there are clear anatomical differences between Neandertals and modern humans.

Point 12. Menton's statement that Neandertals and modern humans are only differentiated, genetically, by “a small fragment of DNA” is false.  The best palaeogenomic evidence for the relationship between modern humans and Neandertals is contained here. Dennis Venema writes:

Somewhere between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago, the ancestors of the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) left Africa and migrated into the Middle East region, and from there on to Europe and parts of Asia. (Recall that human ancestors, at this point, are all still in Africa, and will stay put until around 50,000 years ago). Neanderthals persisted in the Middle East and Europe until ~30,000 years ago, meaning there was a time where the humans leaving Africa about 50,000 years ago could have interbred with them before they went extinct. This remained an open question until techniques improved to recover and sequence ancient DNA. It is now possible to obtain and sequence DNA from Neanderthal remains, and the complete genome sequence of Neanderthals was published in early 2010. The results were fascinating: DNA sequence comparisons between the two species indicates that modern, non-African humans have about 1-4% Neanderthal DNA in their genomes. This variation, however, is not present in sub-Saharan Africans, since they are descended from humans that did not leave Africa and and thereby, because of geographical separation, never had the opportunity to interbreed with Neanderthals. We also know that the group that left Africa went through a reduction in population size to about 1200 individuals (a genetic bottleneck), whereas those that stayed behind maintained a larger population size (about 6000) over the same period.

I had some additional comments on this as they related directly to the fossil evidence in a different post in the same series here.  Menton may be correct that there is nothing inferior about Neandertals relative to modern man, but that is not the same thing as saying that there is nothing different.  The two clearly were, even if the significance of the the scope and breadth of the differences is under debate.  While earlier authors did not have access to the statistical and genetic tools that we currently do, their eyeball impressions of Neandertals clearly led them to think that they were not modern human.  This is not a case of modern authors projecting primitiveness on them.  They were seen that way out of the box.

Next, the conclusion.  

¹Frayer, D. W. (2013). Who You Calling a Neanderthal? The New York Times,  May 2, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/opinion/global/Who-Are-You-Calling-a-Neanderthal.html?_r=0

²Boule, M. (1913). L'homme fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints: Masson.

³Drell, J. R. R. (2000). Neanderthals: A History of Interpretation. Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 19(1), 1-24

⁴Harvati, K. (2007). Neanderthals and Their Contemporaries. In W. Henke & I. Tattersall (Eds.), Handbook of paleoanthropology (pp. 1717-1748): Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

⁵Kidder, J. H., Jantz, R. L., & Smith, F. H. (1992). Defining modern humans: a multivariate approach. In F. H. Smith & G. Bräuer (Eds.), Continuity or replacement (pp. 157-177). Rotterdam: A.A. Balkema.

Dennis Venema on Human Evolution and Palaeogenomics

Dennis Venema is doing the genetics end of human evolution.  He has, as with most evolutionary creationists, taken the long view of creation, to the point where he has publicly stated that the modern human genome could not possibly have originated with two individuals.  Knowing what I do of the fossil record (upcoming BioLogos posts on June 16-18), I have no problem with that.  He focuses on palaeogenomics, and writes:

The discovery of Neanderthal remains in the same location that preserved the exceptional Denisovan DNA at last provided a very high quality Neanderthal genome, the analysis of which was published just this year. This new data allowed for several more robust analyses comparing human, Denisovan, and Neanderthal genomes. These analyses produced several noteworthy results: modern mainland Asian populations also have a small amount of Denisovan DNA; humans contributed some DNA variation to Neanderthals; Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred, with DNA variation flowing both ways; and (perhaps most interestingly) Denisovans have DNA variation that suggests they interbred with yet another archaic hominin group, possibly Homo erectus.

While the palaeogenomic data indicate a split time of c. 600 Ky years for modern humans and Neandertals, it is fairly clear from other genetic evidence that there was at least some interbreeding between early moderns and Neandertals all the way up to around 50 Ky B.P. (perhaps as recently as 29 Ky, given the information from the Portuguese burial at Lagar Velho), as well as interbreeding between the newly emerging African moderns and African archaic Homo sapiens. 

The news that the Denisovans have some very archaic DNA in them is not surprising.  IF modern humans and Neandertals split around 600 Ky B.P., the only people running around on the landscape at that point were early archaic Homo sapiens/late Homo erectus.  The salient feature of the name "archaic Homo sapiens" is that it is not a taxonomic name but rather a linguistic "catch-all."  The primary reason for this is because, as I noted in my series on human origins, the earliest members of this group still have some Homo erectus characteristics, while the later ones look more modern.  When these fossils, which all date to between (possibly ) 800 and 400 Ky B.P., were pulled out of the ground, researchers did not know what to call them, so they applied this "catch-all."  Adding to the confusion is that some of the archaic Homo sapiens crania from Africa bear more than a passing similarity to some of the finds in Europe.  All were clearly transitional but what to call them was a mystery.  Researchers such as Bernard Wood, applying systematics to the problem, have suggested that these forms should be given the name Homo heidelbergensis.  Such a taxon would, however, have quite a lengthy geomorphochronocline, stretching its limits, perhaps, to the breaking point. For a refresher on these fossils, you might want to read this post. 

So, if the split between modern humans and Neandertals was around 600 Ky B.P., who would have been the progenitors of these groups?  Modern humans don't appear on the landscape until between 160 and 190Ky B.P.  Neandertals don't appear until maybe 300 Ky B.P.  Here is one possible scenario. Sometime prior to 600k B.P., there was a migration out of Africa by one or more groups of archaic Homo sapiens/late Homo erectus.  This explains the similarities between the Petralona and African Kabwe crania, as well as that of the Gran Dolina remains and the African Bodo cranium.  In Africa, the archaics went about their business being archaic until around 200 ky B.P., when the modern genome began to arise (in response to what?).  In Europe, over time, in the face of not one but two ice ages (The Riss and Würm), one group evolved into the Neandertals, who's remains are found in Europe, the Levant, northern Iraq and very western Russia. Populations in the two areas would have, depending on the level of gene flow in the circum-Mediterranean area, become genetically isolated.

Now here is the really odd thing.  When these groups reunited, so to speak, they discovered that, not only was there an attraction, they were still genetically compatible after some 500 thousand years apart—to a point. Even though they actually produced viable offspring (and the presence of Neandertal genes in modern humans demonstrates that they were), because the Neandertal and modern human genomes were "optimized" if you will, eventually over time, hybrid depression would likely have ensued, reducing the fitness of the hybrid offspring.  This may account for the ultimate demise of the Neandertals, who had a genome that, with the warming at the end of the early Würm stadial, was likely undergoing negative selection pressure.  If, in fact, there was a swamping of the Neandertal genome by arriving moderns through the gates of Europe, this would have sped up the process.

This scenario is bare bones at best but explains much of the fossil data.  It leaves aside the hotly contested notion of whether or not Neandertals were a separate species from the early moderns and, with them, reflected a syngameon, or whether, as Milford Wolpoff contends, they reflect a widely polytypic species that interbred at the peripheries.  That is for another day. 

Science, Faith and Cognitive Dissonance

Josh Rosenau, who used to write a blog called Thoughts from Kansas, has written a very thoughtful post on the world view as it applies to faith in God and the practice of science.  It has been argued by those who view faith dimly that to practice science and believe that God can work in the modern world is to hold two cognitively dissonant views.  If science is to be reliable, the world must be a spiritually closed system—no input from God—or else one can never reliably predict the results of a particular hypothesis without knowing for sure that God did not have a hand in the outcome.

For example, if a hurricane is traveling up the eastern seaboard and the people of the coastal town of West Noiseville pray that the hurricane misses their nice little hamlet, and, lo and behold, it veers off at the last minute, was that, in fact, the handiwork of God or did the naturally-occurring prevailing winds simply act to perform this action?  When testing atmospheric models to see where the hurricane is going to go, scientists do not take into account the prayers of West Noiseville's residents.  They cannot, because those are outside the purview of the scientific method.  Did God answer their prayers?  Science cannot tell us.  The problem, according to some, however, is that by entertaining a world view that even allows the actions of God, we are compromising our scientific endeavors.  We are allowing for untestable hypotheses.  Jerry Coyne, a notable atheist, makes this argument.  Coyne, however, argues that there are perfectly good scientists who believe in God and that this dissonance is almost subconscious.  He writes:

Although I think scientists who are religious are engaged in a form of subconscious cognitive dissonance, I’ve never said that religious belief automatically prevents somebody from doing good science. There were many believers, even in my own field (Ronald Fisher and Theodosius Dobzhansky, to name two) who made immense contributions to evolutionary biology. And although I vehemently object to Francis Collins’s touting scientific evidence for God (i.e., “The Moral Law”), I’ve said repeatedly that Collins was a good scientist and that I had no scientific objections to his heading the National Institutes of Health.

Here is how Rosenau characterizes Coyne’s position:

Coyne takes the philosophical stance that science and religion are, in some sense, intrinsically incompatible, and he believes that a consequence of this incompatibility will be some sort of psychological conflict in the minds of religious scientists.

I happen to think that his philosophy is flawed, simplistic, and ill-argued, but that’s for another day. He’s claiming that the philosophical point makes a prediction about people’s mental processes, which should be testable. Facts are stubborn things, and a good scientist ought to be willing to adjust his philosophy in response to stubborn facts that stand at odds with those predictions.

Rosenau then goes on to give a rousing list of scientists who were devoutly religious who not only performed excellent science but did so, they felt, in the service of their God.

I also think that Coyne is wrong but for a different reason.

How you view science largely depends on whether or not you take the “short” view or the “long” view of creation. For example, there is evidence that some very bad diseases that we as humans suffer from are caused or at least activated by endogenous retroviruses. These include some cancers and MS. The short view argues that the earth was created in the very recent past and that all bad things that occur around us are direct results of a tangible, physical fall from grace by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, subsequent to which the world was irrevocably changed. They are the “decay” of this fall.

But here's the problem. There is also very good genetic evidence that there has been incorporation of parts of some of these retroviruses into systems such as placental development, which means that, from a human survivability perspective, some of this retroviral DNA has resulted in a “good” thing.  Further, it seems clear that these responses have evolved over a considerable period of time.  These findings are clearly incompatible with the short view of creation.  But need these findings lead to philosophical conundrums?

Coyne has no bad things to say about the scientists that he mentioned (Fisher, Dobzhansky) because they performed science with integrity and honesty and yet were men of faith.  These scientists were not just old earth creationists, but, like their modern counterparts Francisco Ayala, Simon Conway-Morris, Dennis Venema and others, they were evolutionary creationists.  To these people, science is our way of understanding God's creation.  In the process of doing so, however, the first casualty is the short view. These folks found, as did 99% of other Christians practicing in the sciences, that, as Pat Robertson put it a few days ago, there just ain't no way the universe was created six thousand years ago.  They further found that, yes, by gum, evolution really does happen. 

Once you open yourself up to those possibilities,  there is no scientific endeavor that will lead you to any kind of psychological conflict because all roads lead to Rome.  If you truly believe that God created the heavens and the earth, then any research will simply be illuminating that.  Does this cause a rethink of the literal nature of certain scriptural passages?  Yup, sure does.  But there have been competing interpretive models of those passages for centuries. 

Coyne is quite correct that cognitive dissonance can occur in some instances.  If you pursue scientific research to its logical ends, and your scriptural hermeneutic is narrow, you will eventually suffer from this dissonance.  This is, in part, fueling some of the problems at Bryan College right now and is causing somewhat of a crisis of faith in evangelical Christianity. 

If, on the other hand, your understanding of scripture looks more like this, then the sky's the limit.  As Conrad Hyers points out:

...the Genesis accounts of creation do not prove to be in conflict with scientific or historical knowledge. This is not because the creation texts can be shown to be in conformity with the latest scientific and historical knowledge, or supported by it, but precisely because they have little to do with it. They belong to radically different types of literature, with equally different types of concerns and goals.

Where does this leave miracles? Dunno. I will tackle that on another day.

A Plea From Dennis Venema

Dennis Venema, who has written many good posts for BioLogos has written an article for the Colossian Forum titled “What I Would Like To Hear A Young-Earth Creationist Say.”  Rather than wax scientifically, he focuses, instead, on the things that we should have in common:

...the most important thing I would like to hear a YEC say to someone of my views isn’t a scientific statement at all – it’s a statement of unity in Christ. It’s the simple “brother” or “sister” that says – “we’re both part of the same family.” Even if we disagree on the mechanism of creation, affirming our unity in Christ needs to be the starting point for the conversation.

For those of us who are Evolutionary creationists/theistic evolutionists, he writes about a hypothetical conversation which, for some of us, is a constant fear:

“So, what do you do for work?”
 
“I’m a biologist. I teach up at the local Christian university.”

“Oh, really? You must really love the work that (insert the individual’s favorite anti-evolution ministry) does. It’s so good to have Christians like you who fight against evolution.” 

“Well, actually…”

 I have many friends in church to which I dare not bring up the evolution/creation debate.  I remember when one of of my friends from Bible Study was looking at my poster of the Tower of Time, a small version of the one by John Gurche that hung in the Smithsonian for years.  She remarked "How can you believe any of this?"  Implicit in her comment that was the poster represented an anti-God, anti-biblical  view of the world.  How do you bring someone like my friend, who had little to no scientific background, up to speed on the evidence.  Even if you could, would it matter?

Venema suggests (and I agree) that this issue should always be of secondary importance to the call of Christ and the unity that we should feel and express with each other:

So, to my YEC brothers and sisters, I would make this request. Without minimizing the importance of the exegetical issues that the creation/evolution controversy raises, let’s first and foremost sit at the Lord’s table and break bread together, recognizing each other as brothers and sisters in Christ and members of the same body. Those of us who see things from an EC perspective may need to repent of belittling our YEC brothers and sisters as scientifically ignorant or theologically naive. Those of a YEC perspective may need to repent of condemning their EC brothers and sisters as “compromisers” or theologically liberal.

I confess that belittling is easy to do and that is where the problem lies. It is too easy to do that and not to see the unity in Christ. We enjoy arguments and we enjoy disagreements. It gets the blood flowing and the dander up. But at some point, we have to see beyond that. Are the Christians that espouse the YEC viewpoint going to heaven? Yup. Are those of us that are EC going to heaven. I certainly believe so.

Having said all of this, we do have a responsibility to honestly treat the evidence that we encounter and to learn about God's creation from it. That does not change. To point out the variances from this is a worthy cause, but we should never believe that those who espouse those positions are not saved by grace, because, when the dust settles, we are all in need of that. 

Fuz Rana on Human Evolution

Fuz Rana wants to know: “Will the Real Human Ancestor Please Stand Up.” He writes:

It is commonly reported that humans and chimps share 99 percent genetic similarity. For many people, this high degree of genetic similarity means humans must have evolved from an ape-like primate, sharing a common ancestor with chimpanzees. However, it should be noted that, when comparing the full genomes of humans and chimps, around one quarter of the two genomes don’t align and the similarity of those portions that do align is between 90 and 95 percent. (Go here and here for comparisons.)

According to the evolutionary model, humans and chimps share a common ancestor with gorillas. And humans, chimps, and gorillas share a common ancestor with orangutans. These presumed evolutionary relationships should be reflected in genetic comparisons between humans and the great apes, where scientists expect to find gorillas and orangutans displaying less similarity, respectively, to humans than to chimpanzees.

Yet, this is not always the case. Researchers have recently discovered that about one percent of the human genome displays a greater genetic similarity to orangutans than it does to chimpanzees. This result follows on the heels of an earlier study that found that 23 percent of random sequences sampled from the human genome point to a primate other than chimpanzees as our closest evolutionary relative.2 In other words, depending on the region of the genome that is selected, differing “evolutionary trees” result for humans and the great apes.

He argues that a key portion of evolutionary biology is violated because these genetic trees do not completely agree with each other and don't completely agree with the fossil record. In support of this idea, he cites three articles, the first of which is called “Incomplete Lineage Sorting Patterns among Human, Chimpanzee, and Orangutan Suggest Recent Orangutan Speciation and Widespread Selection.” (http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/gr.114751.110). Ironically, in a section of the article to which Rana does not refer, the authors of this paper write:

The exact amount of ILS [interlineage sorting] locally in the genome depends on the recombination rate and factors such as functional constraints (Figs. 4, 5). The observed ~1% of ILS is entirely consistent with the effective population size of 50,000 inferred for the human–chimpanzee ancestor and the speciation time difference of 8 Myr inferred between human–chimpanzee and human–chimpanzee–orangutan, assuming a generation time of 20 yr [emphasis mine].

How does this not fit an evolutionary model? These authors of this paper certainly think it does, an expected one, at that. No evolutionary biologist has ever said that there has to be 100% agreement between all different kinds of trees. It has never occurred to them that this would ever be a problem. That is a straw man argument that Rana has put up. In response to the argument of discordant trees, Dennis Venema has posted a great article on this concept of incomplete lineage sorting. He writes:

The fact that gene phylogenies/trees and species phylogenies/trees don’t always match is not something that surprises scientists, since it is a well-known phenomenon and the mechanisms underlying it are understood: species arise from genetically diverse populations and that diversity does not always sort completely down to every descendant species.

The second article that Rana cites is “Mapping Human Genetic Ancestry,” by Ebersberger et al. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msm156). Once again, in a part of the article to which Rana does not refer, they write:

For about 23% of our genome, we share no immediate genetic ancestry with our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. This encompasses genes and exons to the same extent as intergenic regions. We conclude that about 1/3 of our genes started to evolve as human-specific lineages before the differentiation of human, chimps, and gorillas took place. This explains recurrent findings of very old human-specific morphological traits in the fossils record, which predate the recent emergence of the human species about 5-6 MYA. Furthermore, the sorting of such ancestral phenotypic polymorphisms in subsequent speciation events provides a parsimonious explanation why evolutionary derived characteristics are shared among species that are not each other's closest relatives [emphasis mine].

Funny, it doesn't look like the authors are proposing a non-evolutionary relationship here. Once again, it fits perfectly with what we think is going on with the fossil record, which indicates a human-chimp separation time at around 6 million years ago. In fact, this kind of scenario fits perfectly with the recent finding about the frame-shift mutation of the sugar molecule Neu5Gc, suggesting that sympatric speciation may have happened in the human fossil line (the G.G. Simpson in me just shuddered). It is, consequently, difficult to see how this article supports Rana’s conclusion.

The third article that Rana has marshaled to his argument is by Morris Goodman, one of the dons of genetic analysis. The Goodman article appears in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution¹. He quotes Goodman as writing thus:

If the biblical account of creation were true, then independent features of morphology, proteins, and DNA sequences would not be expected to be congruent with each other. Chaotic patterns, with different proteins and different DNA sequences failing to indicate any consistent set of species relationships, would contradict the theory of evolution.

Rana is using this statement by Goodman to indict evolutionary theory, since, given what he thinks he has shown, that is exactly what the evidence of the first two papers is. The problem is that a bit further in the article, Goodman says:

Human serum proteins shown only small antigenic differences from orang-utans and gibbons, and tiny differences from gorillas and chimpanzees. Given the extensive morphological evolution involved, the extent of protein evolution between humans and other hominoids is surprisingly small. Alternatively, if the 'molecular clock' is applied to immunological distances and the divergence between hominoids and old world monkeys arbitrarily set at 30 million years ago, the human-African ape split occurs at 5 million years ago [emphasis mine].

Once again, perfectly in keeping with evolutionary theory and perfectly in keeping with the results by Ebersbrerger et al, who also (twenty years later!) see the evidence as pointing to a human/ape split between five and six million years ago.

It is difficult to find anything redeeming in Rana's post. It is further difficult to derive a conclusion that these articles don't support the evolutionary paradigm, since they all clearly do. Did he simply not read them? Did he hope that none of his readers would? For someone who is trained in molecular biology to employ such a standard creationist trick is astounding and deeply, deeply disappointing. It also lends more credence to what Todd Wood recently said about RTB:

I would recommend that no one accept any of RTB's arguments without fact-checking their claims first. I do not know whether these problems are due to lazy scholarship, ignorance, intentional deception, or ideological blinders. What I do know is that you cannot trust Reasons to Believe.

I can't add much to that.

¹Goodman, Morris (1992) “Reconstructing Human Evolution from Proteins,” in Steve Jones, Robert Martin, and David Pilbeam, eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 307–13.

----------------
Now playing: Renaissance - The Sisters
via FoxyTunes

Dennis Venema: Ask an Evolutionary Creationist

Dennis Venema has a new post over at BioLogos that is in the form of a Q&A and touches most of the main tenets of evolutionary creationism.  Check it out

Hugh Ross on Common Ancestry

What in the Wide World of Sports is a' Goin' on at RTB??????????

One of my readers clued me in to a podcast by Hugh Ross in which he tackles theistic evolution, otherwise known as evolutionary creationism. The title of the series is “I did not know that.” This particular talk can be found here.

The focus of the talk is how there is evidence for a historical Adam and Eve and that they were created between fifty and sixty thousand years ago. He specifically contrasts theistic evolution with what he calls the “Biblical model for human origins,” as if there is no theological basis for TE.

His understanding of TE is that we evolved from early ape forms but that it was controlled by God in a way that we scientists can never discover. This is a peculiar statement because science, left to its own devices, is not in the business of discovering whether or not God controlled events and processes. It is through faith that people believe in God.

Ross is one of the original proponents of the “tweaking” argument—that the universe shows evidence of a divine hand that tweaked the gravitational constants and elemental formation in just such a way as to allow life to occur. One degree off either way and...nothing. This is put forth in his book Fingerprint of God.

As I have mentioned before, the problem with this argument is that it is post hoc. We think that it is tweaked because we are here to observe it. There was always a slight probability that the universe would have developed like this anyway.

First he argues that evolution cannot explain the complexity of life because the second law of thermodynamics will degrade the genome of any species over time.

Wrong.

The second law of thermodynamics only applies to closed systems. Hugh Ross is a physicist and he is not aware that the earth is not a closed system? How can that be? It is part of the earth/sun system. There is also interaction with other bodies such as the moon. Everything on earth receives energy from the sun and this, in itself, is a thermodynamic process. Further, as someone else put it, if the earth really is a closed system, then God cannot operate in it. As soon as you introduce intervention from outside, the system opens. Onward...

He then says that the human genome has gotten more decayed over time since the creation of Adam and Eve also because of the influence of the second law of thermodynamics.

Wrong.

The second law of thermodynamics does not explain this. Genetics does. Our genome is more decayed (if you will) because of the influence of genetic load. With extensive gene flow, bad alleles are masked and can persist in a population in large numbers without expression. As we have been able to address many genetic defects with medical treatments, the number of these alleles has increased in our population. This is especially true in western nations, where our diet and behavior has created even more problems for us.

Ross states that there is evidence that modern humans have not been around very long because in Chromosome 21, there are only three different haplotypes and that, if humanity was older than that, there would be more.

Wrong.

This is a complete misread of a paper by Jin, et al (1999)¹ in which the authors study the haplotypes of Chromosome 21 in an effort to shed light on modern human origins. For one thing, there aren't three haplotypes, as Ross asserts. There are ten. There are three haplogroups that suggest that there were three migratory episodes of modern humans out of Africa. Ross focuses on the word “entropy” and, unfortunately, interprets it the way a physicist would. In this case, entropy refers to a function of Wrights F_st, which is a measure of genome variability. For example, North Americans have less entropy because they have greater genetic homogeneity than other groups that were studied. It has nothing to do with thermodynamics.

Ross argues that the chromosomal evidence that humans and the higher apes have a different number of chromosomes is invalid or misunderstood. In the early 1990s, it was discovered that human chromosome two is an end-to-end-fusion of two ape chromosomes. A close examination of chromosome two revealed that, while the other twenty-two chromosomes have one centromere, or central segment, human chromosome two has an extra non-functional centromere. Furthermore, while every chromosome has end segments known as telomeres, human chromosome two has inactive adjacent telomere segments in the middle of the chromosome. It is argued that, sometime in our early past, there was a translocation of two chromosomes to form Chromosome two. Ross argues that such a translocation could not possibly have happened because this would be “catastrophic for the organism” and would result in death.

Wrong.

There are many documented cases of translocation in animal species. There are species of horses that have different numbers of chromosomes and yet can produce fertile offspring. Ross further hampers his argument by saying that the jury is still out on whether or not the evidence is real because they might only appear to be centromeres and telomeres. This is, again, nonsense. It is obvious what they are. Further, how does he explain the duplication of the genes sequences in each chromosome?

Ross then tackles evidence for common ancestry contained in the disovery that the great apes and humans share the inability to manufacture vitamin C. He argues that in place of the inability to produce vitamin C is a new mechanism that recycles vitamin C in apes and humans. This is, he argues, not a loss of genetic function so much as it is a gaining of a new function. What Ross side-steps here and never mentions is that the arising of this mechanism in apes and humans is still evidence of common ancestry. In fact, it is better evidence because it means that exaptation happened in a common ancestor which was then passed on to each line.

And how does the evidence of the creation of a new mechanism in apes and humans figure into his idea of genome degradation?

He then launches into a discussion of the mitochondrial DNA evidence for the origins of modern humans and suggests that it demonstrates that we are descended from one woman (Eve) and then argues that this person likely lived between 50 and 60 thousand years ago. He further argues that Adam lived at the same time, based on Y-Chromosome evidence. This is their “testable creation model.”

There is a distinct problem with the harmonization of this evidence and the Bible. First, you have to really stretch the biblical genealogies to get them as far back as 50 to 60 thousand years. Second, while it is true that there was one original mtDNA variant from which modern humans are said to have arisen, that does not mean that there was only one woman alive at the time. In fact, there is evidence that there were thousands of modern humans alive at the time and that there was no distinct human couple at all.

Worse, the new evidence indicating that modern humans have 9% Neandertal genes calls into serious question the integrity of modern Homo sapiens as a unique species, suggesting that we are much, much older than we thought—perhaps 200 to 300 thousand years old.

He closes out by suggesting that the DNA evidence supports the disembarkation of four women and four men from Noah's ark, like that in Genesis 6-8. Aside from the genetic data indicating that the modern human population bottleneck reported by Venema occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, not the Middle East, there is not a scrap of biological, geological or palaeontological evidence that there was a world-wide flood of any kind.

In one fell swoop, RTB has turned its back on its historical Old-earth, progressive creation model and embraced the heart of young earth creationism, a model that has no serious scientific support of any kind. Is this really what RTB wants to do? If it really is accepting the idea that there were only eight people alive at the time of the flood, it must. It has always carved out a place that is separate from that of the major YEC groups and attempted to use conventional science as support for its apologetics. Now it seems that they are willing to accept a completely concordist model, even if it means the world-wide flood model, warts and all.

Not a fine day for scholarship.

¹Jin, L., Underhill, P. A., Doctor, V., et al. (1999). Distribution of haplotypes from a chromosome 21 region distinguishes multiple prehistoric human migrations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96(7), 3796-3800. doi: http://www.pnas.org/content/96/7/3796.abstract

----------------
Now playing: Yes - Into the Storm
via FoxyTunes

Reasons to Believe and the Credibility Gap

Todd Wood has wrapped up his long series on the problems with Fuz Rana's interpretation of the human/chimp DNA differences and his responses to Dennis Venema's writings. He closes with some sobering thought:

To be honest, I do not believe that RTB will pay any attention whatsoever to this series of posts. Given Rana's insulting response to Venema's critique, I expect that they'll treat this as yet another "ad hominem attack." I've mostly written this series for third parties that might be confused about the Venema/Rana exchange. As far as I'm concerned, RTB's credibility is completely shot (read my analysis of their handling of the Neandertal genome for more evidence of errors and exaggerations on the part of Ross, Rana, and Samples: parts one, two, three). I would recommend that no one accept any of RTB's arguments without fact-checking their claims first. I do not know whether these problems are due to lazy scholarship, ignorance, intentional deception, or ideological blinders. What I do know is that you cannot trust Reasons to Believe.

This is very disappointing but, having read enough of Steve Matheson's writings, not entirely surprising. Once upon a time I had much respect for Hugh Ross and the work he did to try to convince the evangelical community that there could be a fulfilling theological construct that incorporated an old creation. He came to the University of Tennessee in the early 1990s and gave a series of compelling, cogent lectures on the astrophysical evidence. Even then, though, I had misgivings about what his (and his organization's) treatment of the biological data would be like. Now, it seems that my misgivings were well-founded and we have our answer.

Praise for Todd Wood

Larry Moran over at Sandwalk has been following the debate between Fuz Rana over at RTB and Dennis Venema, at BioLogos, about the human/chimpanzee genomic similarities. I have been meaning to comment on the debate but have gotten involved in my own posts and haven't had the time. Anyway, this came to the attention of Todd Wood, down at Bryan College, who has been running his own set of posts on the debate. Moran has this to say:

Fortunately for us, Todd Wood of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee, USA is on the case. Todd belongs to a young-Earth creation study group [BSG] but don't let that fool you. He's doing a pretty good job of sorting out the facts in the case.

This might seem somewhat backhanded but if you read what Wood has to say, he is obviously struggling with the lack of integrity on the part of RTB. It is nice to see a young earth creationist try to deal with the data honestly. Most of the time the lack of integrity exhibited by young earth creationists is maddening, distasteful and disheartening. Hats off to Todd Wood.

Dennis Venema Videos on Being an Evolutionary Creationist

In his post on Focus on the Family's "Truth" Project, Steve Martin had a link to some videos done by Dennis Venema on how a Christian can accept evolution. Dennis teaches biology at Trinity Wesleyan University and was faced with a situation where his church began to use the "Truth Project." He felt that he needed to respond, so he gave a series of lectures on evolution. He has graciously posted these to YouTube here.

There are eight of them and I would encourage you to look at all of them. Here is the first one.



----------------
Now playing: Nazz - You Are My Windowvia FoxyTunes